An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Duck, It’s a Snow Flake!

It was a good
thing troopers at Fort Keogh were issued warm, heavy buffalo robe coats and
hats.They needed them in January 1887
when the snow was significantly deeper than in this earlier photo.

Note:Winter
has been a bust in these parts this year.I doubt we have had three inches of total accumulation in McHenry County
all year.And as I type this in the
overnight hours, there is a thunderstorm outside with a forecast for tomorrow
calling for highs in the 60’s and possible flash floods tomorrow.Before we started mucking about with Mother
Nature, winters tended to be made of sterner stuff.By coincidence, yesterday’s post about the
fate of the cow pony Old Blue touched on one of the same series of storms as
this entry which made the winter of 1886-87 so memorable on the High
Plains.The following first appeared in
the blog two years ago.

The winter of 1886-87
was the most brutal ever recorded over a wide swath of the West.East of the Rocky Mountains from Indian Territory to Montana storm after storm dumped white
stuff on the open range where much
of the nation’s beef was raised.The Great Blizzard of ’87, which lasted for
ten days from January 9 to 19, was worst in Montana.Sixteen inches of snow came down the first 16
hours amid driving winds and temperatures that dipped to -47˚.And it just kept coming.

Cattle, already
weakened by a summer drought and poor grass, floundered and died by the
hundreds of thousands.As ranchers began
to try to dig out of drifts that covered their cabins and reached high lofts of
their barns, they hoped things would get better.

But on January 29 at Fort Keogh near Miles City in southeastern Montana huge flakes began to fall.And I mean huge.Flakes were gathered and measured at 15
inches across and 8 inches thick weighing several ounces.Men, horses, and cattle were actually injured
by the falling flakes, the largest ever recorded anywhere.The reports we so outlandish that they might
have been dismissed as tall tales had they not been witnessed and attested to
by a whole Army post.

More blizzards fallowed
in February.When the spring thaw finally came,
coincidentally unleashing devastating floods, the corpses of millions of cattle
littered the plains.The industry was
virtually wiped out and the old system of open range feeding never recovered.

So, campers, I know
it’s been a rough winter a lot of places.But thank your lucky stars the flakes of Fort Keogh did not fall again.